Bremen: 15th - 17th October 2003

International Conference on Entrepreneurship and Business Incubation

Minutes

Short Summary of Conference

In the process of globalisation regional innovation benchmarking and entrepreneurial management is getting more and more important. The Thematic Network STRINNOP has proved itself as a platform for the international exchange of regional innovation benchmarking activities and for successful entrepreneurial concepts to foster innovative activities in SME and in the region.
Main concern of the final conference in Bremen (Germany) which was organized in collaboration with the Transatlantic Business School Alliance was to share hot topics and discuss project findings. Key topics were:

• regional benchmarking and company benchmarking state of art
• business incubation and technology centres, including how to a ttract young firms, and
• entrepreneurship building at universities and within companies.

In addition to the conference study visits at the Technology Park Bremen and at the cluster "mobile solutions were organised, the second in collaboration with the ERIK-thematic working group "Clusters". Here future trends and challenges in the rapidly evolving world of mobile communications were discussed.
Topics in this context were:

• BITZ. Bremer Innovations- und Technologiezentrum
• Pre-Seed-Program for Academic Start-Ups
• t.i.m.e. programme (www.bremen-in-time.de)
• cluster "mobile solution group" (www.mobile-solution-group.de)
• Mobile Solution Center
• Project Center for e/m-business.
  

Invited experts from all over Europe met in Bremen and formed a top-class conference programme (see agenda, presentations and participation list at the project website: www.strinnop.net). Speakers from politics, academia, R&D organisations, regional development agencies and ministries offered an insight into current regional strategies, implementation activities and future trends. About 140 registered participants from 33 European countries as well as from U.S.A. and Mexico enjoyed the presentations and different perspectives given on services to innovative SME, activities to perform regional innovation benchmarking (see STRINNOP Guidebook www.strinnop.net) and business oriented topics.

The discussion during the conference underlined that regional economical development needs innovation and its implementation in the market. Regarding the educational support the presentations showed that especially those curricula offer a fruitful framework for innovative ideas which are highly practice-oriented and include an intercultural approach at an early stage. Looking at the good practice show cases (see library of good practice cases of the STRINNOP partners in the web www.strinnop.net) the well directed public money in specific strategic measures in a region show correlative economic growth such as in the case of VIB Biotech Valley in Gent (F), Microtechnologies in Itzehoe (D) or Mobile Solutions in Bremen (D). The conference offered not only information on hot topics but first of all gave the opportunity to exchanging new approaches and ideas with other regions working in the field of innovation support activities.

Next to learning from good practice experiences the newly developed STRINNOP Facilitator was of high interest to the conference participants. The Tool supports the self assessment of the Regional Innovation Profile by providing a set of indicators. The user fills in his ratings and gets an immediate visual feedback of his assessment in form of a "spider diagram" with axes according the STRINNOP step-by-step approach.

 

Figure 1: STRINNOP Facilitator.

A step-wise comparison of an individual Regional Innovation Profile to the whole STRINNOP sample.

Single indicators are merged by the STRINNOP Facilitator to the rating of single steps in a comfortable way not requiring a score for every indicator. The individual assessment can be benchmarked to the ratings to (min-mean-max) of the whole STRINNOP sample.

The “STRINNOP Facilitator” indicates the user the strengths and weaknesses of his/her region in a visual way. If the facilitator discloses some regional weaknesses the user can directly switch to the STRINNOP website in order to find out which good practice tools the STRINNOP members offer to overcome the identified weaknesses. All STRINNOP members are willing to assist other regions in transferring their published STRINNOP good practice tools to other regions and adapting them according to the specific regional framework and regulations.

The regional self-assessments by the STRINNOP regions were performed by single partner institutions, by a group of actors of the regional innovation support or by members of the regional steering committee. Therefore the gathered experiences cover a broad scope. The increased awareness of the involved persons for the regional SWOT (strengths – weaknesses – opportunities – threats) is often mentioned as one major benefit of this self-assessment experiment. The debate on single indicators within the single regions and within the STRINNOP network has strengthen the awareness of most of the regions for developing clearer targets for the regional innovation supporting infrastructure as they have so far.
The “STRINNOP Facilitator” is available under "www.STRINNOP.net à results" and enables a region to assess itself and to compare the results to the STRINNOP sample in a convenient and pragmatic way.

In conclusion the discussions of the conference showed that there is high interest to collaborate in developing a methodology for regional innovation benchmarking and profiling. STRINNOP partners plan to develop the methodology further in the context of a planned call for proposals by DG Enterprise in spring 2004.

Here you can download the minutes of the final internat STRINNOP Workshop:

Minutes final internal workshop (pdf - 708 KB)

Presentations

Here you can find the presentations of the 3rd meeting in Odense:

Here you can download informations about the speakers and abstracts of their presentations:

Abstracts (pdf - 1,2MB)